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Category Archives: Employee Engagement

SAP HR 2016 was a return to my home territory as a speaker. The last time I spoke at an SAP Insider conference (HR conference) was in 2010. So, it has been a while. A lot has changed in the SAP HCM landscape since then. And I have in some ways, moved onto doing more exciting things – not entirely away from SAP HCM, but onto more generic HCM technologies & Mobility in particular. This year, I decided to test how much of a thirst is there among the audience, especially the ones attending SAP HR conferences, for my current pet topic, “Employee Engagement” and decided to submit an abstract during the fall of 2015. I was very clear that this topic is not SAP specific.

The SAP Insider HR conference producers apparently thought there was enough interest in my topic and in my abstract & selected my topic and invited me to speak. I have to thank them for their confidence in me. Creating the right content for this session was not very difficult, but I had fun doing it. And also, it helped me organize what I wanted to convey to my audience in a very organic and an organized way. I delivered my session today (02/26) as scheduled and I was satisfied with the overall flow, reach and audience participation.

Thorsten Gorny and Steve Ditty, my lovely colleagues from Cogent IBS accompanied me to Las Vegas this year. We had a great time bonding & talking about HR, Coobo, Cabaana and Cogent in general.

Here are a few pictures from the last 4 days.

If you are interested in downloading/reading my presentation, here you go…
Enjoy!

Can you measure happiness? More importantly, assuming you can measure happiness, can you control happiness through measurable parameters? And even more importantly, assuming you can control happiness through measurable parameters, how much control do you have over those parameters versus the control your environment has?

A very interesting computational model tries to explore this above question.

And we at Cogent, have been doing our own research on Happiness in a totally different context (Employee Happiness). Needless to say, this is exactly why this study caught our eyes.

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The subjective well-being or happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies. Although happiness is influenced by life circumstances and population demographics such as wealth, we know little about how the cumulative influence of daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. Using computational modeling, we show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is explained not by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations. The robustness of this account was evident in a large-scale replication involving 18,420 participants. Using functional MRI, we show that the very same influences account for task-dependent striatal activity in a manner akin to the influences underpinning changes in happiness.